Andrea Way


Andrea Way is an American artist currently based in Washington, D.C.
Her geometric abstract works stem from a personal fascination with patterns and are based on a system of order and randomness that are labor-intensive, with a "punishing complexity".
She received her B.A. in 1971 from Indiana University, Bloomington, and in 1976 she moved from California to Washington, D.C when her parents decided to move East.

Artistic career

Inspiration

Way has commented that as a child she was inspired by her father's work as a system's analyst, particularly of the grids he used in his work.

Exhibitions

Her first solo exhibition was held in 1980 at the Barbara Fiedler Gallery in Washington, DC. Since then she has held numerous other solo exhibitions at galleries in San Francisco, Brooklyn, and New York, including a mid career retrospective in 2012, Andrea Way: Retrospective 1982–2012, at the American University Museum in the Katzen Arts Center in Washington D.C.
In 2012 she was also featured in the Smithsonian American Art Museum's exhibition, Abstract Drawings, which featured forty-six paper works from the museum's permanent collection. Her drawing Bones was presented alongside works of such artists as Willem de Kooning, Man Ray, Sean Scully, Theodore Roszak, Al Held, Claire Falkenstein, and Gene Davis. The exhibition explored the wide range of possibilities of abstraction as a form of artistic expression.
In the Spring of 2018, she premiered her twenty-third solo show, A Delicate Crossing, at Brian Gross Fine Art in San Francisco.

Collections

Her works have been added to the permanent collections of The Phillips Collection, The Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Cleveland Museum of Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Marsha Mateyka Gallery, and the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden.